Estimate the thermal-inventory retention factor

Develop and validate a data-driven method for estimating the thermal-inventory retention factor in industrial refrigeration systems.

Background

The retention factor is central to the paper’s model: it specifies the fraction of stored cooling that survives from one minute to the next and therefore determines the tradeoff between efficient full-load operation and losses from excessive pre-cooling. The paper evaluates policies over several assumed retention factors but does not estimate the factor from facility data. The authors suggest that data may support such estimation and explicitly leave the estimation problem unresolved.

References

Last, we demonstrate the importance of the inventory retention factor by analyzing the costs of each policy in a variety of settings, but we do not propose a method for estimating the inventory retention factor itself. We believe data can be used in a similar manner to do so, but we leave this estimation problem for future work.

— Holding the Cold: Retention-Aware Inventory Control for Industrial Refrigeration  (2610.06601 - Chen et al., 5 Oct 2026) in Section Conclusion